Teaching Approaches to Promote Consistent ... - Learning Wales

6.4.1 Teachers’ perceptions of boys’ and girls’ interests and/or difficultiesSchools visited in this research were generally aware of differences between boys andgirls in terms of aptitudes or interests.Finding 49: Differences in attainment between boys and girls were notidentified as particular problems in all schools. Three of the nine schools DIDexpress such concerns, and in these the concern was about boys’ lowachievement in literacy.Gender was seldom identified as an issue in relation to mathematics. This was thecase for evidence from head teachers, co-ordinators, teachers and pupils.The head teacher of one school with historically better results in English than inmathematics explained:“We’ve looked very closely at gender. It depends on the cohort, but where theyear group has more boys than girls English is poorer. It’s a culture thing –attitude to learning – they want to kick a ball around.”(head teacher, school F, group En)Another head teacher was concerned about:“…underachieving black African boys. They’ve got low expectations. The(primary) school should be trying to stave off the alienation that happens in thesecondary school, but with no male black African role model this is hard.”(head teacher, school I, group Ma)These statements typify the general pattern from staff in the six of the nine schoolsthat signalled a concern about gender.Lesson observations showed more examples of teachers addressing boys’ behaviourthan girls’ and these occurred in each of the nine schools. Yet the general picture wasof well-managed classes with well-behaved pupils. After noting that a Year 6 teacherhad highlighted boys’ misbehaviour on four occasions for very minor misdeeds, a datacollector wrote:81